More transparency

In many Ubuntu conversation I’ve been part of many of the participants agreed that we need “more transparency”. It’s very easy to agree on as transparency is a good thing, it feels good and it makes things better. Achieving it in a meaningful way is a hard problem to solve though. Meaningful to me means not just “all information is available”, but also “relevant information is easy to find”. In Ubuntu development where hundreds of people put of lots of hard work into Ubuntu, we depend on thousands of other open source projects, where there’s discussions on IRC, on mailing lists, hangouts, in specifications and elsewhere, it’s incredibly easy to lose track of what’s important or relevant.

A lot of teams forming the core of Ubuntu send out weekly summaries of their work, which is great. Among them the Mir and Unity 8 team, the kernel team, Unity APIs team, the Ubuntu Touch team and there’s bits of information everywhere. While this is a great start in being able to get a more complete picture, it also takes some time to read, digest, understand and probably talk to people. To help with this we came up with an idea we already discussed at UDS.

The plan is to read and digest the news and have regular hangouts to which invite engineers to talk about what they’ve been doing, show what’s new and answer questions from the audience. To make this even a bit more interesting, we’d like to invite people from tech blogs and tech news sites. The idea being that they know what their readers would like to hear about and what’s interesting. This would bring together the best of many worlds: what’s new in Ubuntu, the new devices, apps, great stuff from the tech press and live interviews with engineers.

What I’d need now is a bit of help with organising this and setting this up. Please leave a comment or drop me a mail, if you think this is a great idea too and would like to help. 😀

Then those teams that report to there don’t need to do anymore than they already do.

dholbach

I’m afraid not many teams make use of this process. I lobbied for it for years, but I can understand that doing the wiki dance is a bit arduous. (Set up a new page for the month, wait for the wiki to update, update the /Current page, etc.)

dholbach

Yeah, that should make it easy, because they send out these mails anyway.